Diseases are the least of sexually active kids' worries in "It Follows."

Teenage hormones succumb to a terrifyingly haunting presence that just won't give up in the new horror movie written and directed by Clawson native David Robert Mitchell.

His last film, "The Myth of the American Sleepover," centered on suburban Detroit teenagers seeking love and adventure. "It Follows" centers on suburban Detroit kids seeking to simply stay alive post-coitus.

Maika Monroe ("The Guest") stars as Jay, a college-age girl whose date Hugh (Jake Weary) freaks out in a movie theater when he sees a woman in a yellow dress whom Jay can't see. That should be her first warning to run far away, but instead, a subsequent sexual encounter between the two ends up with Jay being held captive and getting some bad news: Hugh has passed on a mysterious and murderous supernatural force to her — like a really unfortunate game of Hot Potato — and now it's out to hunt Jay down.

She is stalked constantly and is left a bundle of nerves, fearing this thing is around every corner or is about to come through every open door. Her friends get involved, but are attacked as well. Still, two of her male pals are all too eager to chip in when it comes to helping her shed the curse: the brooding boy next door (Daniel Zovatto) and the geeky dude (Keir Gilchrist) who has been crushing on her since they were kids.

Sexual promiscuity has long led to bad stuff happening in horror movies, especially in 1970s and '80s slasher flicks and usually early on in the cinematic body count. More recent fare like "Teeth" and "Contracted" have tweaked the trope.

No movie has done it quite as artfully as "It Follows." Mitchell uses wide shots to keep Jay — and the audience — guessing as to where the entity will show up next. It's tricky because it can show up in the form of a friend, a naked lady or a grandma meandering around campus in a nightgown. That last example may sound funny, but the director makes this elderly woman ridiculously creepy.

This strange piece of malevolence has the stick-to-it-iveness of, say, a zombie on "The Walking Dead," but there's no hunger for brains here and what it does is way more bone-chilling than chewing on a limb.

The filmmaker embraces many techniques to keep his audience on edge, including the sparing use of a moody, '80s-style synth-heavy soundtrack. Mitchell also includes several allusions to "The Shining," from Kubrick-like tracking shots to a scene involving a busted wooden door and something deadly on the other side of it.

By the third act, Jay and her group have turned into your standard bumbling movie kids, but the movie never dumbs down its scares and the monster du jour stays true to its own rules. Jay can sleep with someone else and pass on the curse, but that means also harboring the guilt of sentencing them to die. (Plus if they die, then she's back to being the target. It's pretty much a bad situation for everyone.)

"It Follows" is yet another example of how smart the indie horror game has become. It also gives sex-ed classes a frightfully good tool for encouraging their high-school charges to keep their clothes on.